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With a focus on the origin of high-quality food and products, as well as the people who produce them, COP places sustainability and quality at the heart of its concept. L’officiel Austria spoke to the chef Elihay Berliner, about the philosophy of the new restaurant, where there is no place for complex cuisine and how honest cooking enriches the dining experience. L’O: What is the philosophy behind COP?
Elihay Berliner: COP stands for ‘Collection of Produce’. We focus on collecting and building relationships with different people and bringing them together here. We have an extremely minimalistic approach to things. Everything we do at COP is like a three-legged table. If a table has only two legs, it will fall; it cannot stand. If it has four legs, the last one is unnecessary. So, a dish at COP is like that. It does not have a fourth leg. There is never an ingredient, that is not needed. It always stands, and it always makes sense. It never fails. We always play with this game of striping, a bit like Jenga. What can be taken away is unnecessary.
L’O: Where did your idea for this restaurant come from? With such a dedication to food, even more than in a conventional restaurant?
EB: After quitting my old job, I started a catering company. I did a lot of events in the art world, so a lot of gallery openings, museum openings, exhibitions, a lot of food installations and stuff like that. I thought, what would happen if you opened a restaurant and shifted the focus completely away from the cooking.
The most exciting thing for me is collecting. I like to collect stuff, for example, special chairs. I have over 40 chairs, without even having a place for them, so I just store them. I like to find
great wine and produce and create connections with the people behind them. I kind of turned to the place that I loved, and that really brought me joy and excitement, which was all these people. People express themselves by winemaking and by painting. It is the same exact thing, just a different medium.
L’O: You were born in France and grew up in Israel. How did it influence your cooking and your style?
EB: I was trained in France, so I have the traditional cooking training, which shows a lot in what we cook. The French cuisine has fundamental techniques. So, learning there with a bit of a Mediterranean background creates a different mix of classics and old school with progressive. So basically, every dish that we cook here could be cooked in the 16th or 17th century. Nothing that we cook here needs machinery. You need a cutting board, a fire and a knife. Everything is very primal, very basic.
L’O: It will soon be one year since you opened. Is there something that really stuck in your head and you remember very vividly?
EB: As a cook, my focus has always been the kitchen, but since I opened COP, a lot of my work is outside of the kitchen. Now, I’m forced out of my comfort zone a lot and do things I know nothing about. So, my days are a mix of creative work and operational topics through which I learn new things every day. But in many ways, the biggest lesson is learning how to rely on others, and the team that formed over this past year makes it very easy.
L’O: What challenges did you set for yourself?
EB: The whole team and especially our operational chef Tim Wilke and I want to encourage people to change their eating habits by showing that there is a better, more responsible way of handling our food. By consciously choosing the sources of our produce, we can significantly change the impact we have on our community and the environment. We focus on making life better for everyone who gets in contact with us.
L’O: What was the idea behind the dining room?
EB: We designed it together with the artist Julian Epok. He and I were without any architectural experience, just a cook and a painter. Everything is designed from scratch. Nothing was bought, everything was made. We went through almost three years of planning and a year and a half of renovations. We wanted to create a dining experience that is straight forward, minimalistic, honest and clean. No paintings, no flowers. A clean canvas we can pour things onto. Led by fear of distractions and inspired by Le Corbusier’s work, we wanted to create a clash between raw brutalist aesthetics and quiet and elegant forms.